How Connie Bensen, Community Strategist, uses social media

Connie is the lead for Global Community Strategy at Dell Worldwide, out of Austin Texas, and amongst many things runs the Social Business Connections Community site on sharing social media best practices and tools.

Connie’s main personal objective for using social media is brand building, in that it built her brand from 2006 into a globally recognized community manager. Also, social media connects her to her network (friends, peers, new people, work colleagues). Her role is increasing focused on engagement at Dell working with staff (the Dell Rock Stars) and externally helping people at Dell get their message out and engage on social channels.

Connie’s routine is to first look at her email to look at her prompts from social communities (LinkedIN, Google+, Slideshare, not Twitter anymore, communities e.g. Social Media Today when they publisher her blog). It motivates her to get positive comments about her posts. This only takes 10 minutes as she browses not acts on them and keeps her personal email and work email separated so she can separate work from home.

Her personal listening is set up through filters so: Tweetdeck for Twitter, Google Alerts into the inbox, but she also looks at random content like the LinkedIN banner, and browses newsletters (now only 5) sent to her once or twice a week. For her project listening she uses Sprinklr to filter content as well as Radian6.

As far as blogging is concerned, Connie has recently charted the number of blog posts she has done since 2006, but having slowed down to only 4 last year (from doing one every day), she still maintains the levels of traffic to her blog. She feels this is because having built up a large reservoir of good solid content, people keep coming back to it. She also says that having been linked to the Wikipedia entry on the definition of community management, this also drives a lot of traffic. She now has a spiral binder to capture thoughts she can put into blog posts and has committed to blog more this year. She says you need to blog about what you are passionate about and you need to ask third parties about what they think your focus should be as she did when starting out.

Connie is seeing the need for people to start building social into their work day and at Dell, there is a Social Media University (4 classes, total 8 hours, on demand) to help staff do that. She feels more and more employees are beginning to understand they need to ‘be social’ to contribute to the company and to their own career. Connie is currently mentoring 5 people to help build the Dell Social Business Community. Anyone using social externally she says needs to be sure their activity is tied back to the business, also that individuals should not all build their own communities but that they should be part of the corporate approach or else it leads to a wild west and confuses the customer.

Her tip for getting started is begin with Twitter, LinkedIN, and Google+, and get comfortable with re-tweeting. Think as you community as your group of followers on Twitter.

At the end of the video blog the connection gets really poor (sorry) from about 25 minutes (this was the first interview via Google Hangouts on air), but Connie talks about her Dell hardware and the move to open wireless across Dell and how she uses Evernote for her note taking across all devices.

You can reach Connie at her Community Strategist blog Conniebensen.com or @cbensen

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Bob is an innovative marketer with 25 years in technology marketing across all disciplines in small and large brands. A regular commentator on social business and digital marketing his passion is for unlocking the digital potential of both firms and their people.

Bob Barker is a marketer by profession (running Scredible Professional services in the UK), who’s cause is helping to motivate, inspire and educate people about the need for digital and social media competence. More about Bob Barker